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Penn's Family History Of Penn's mother very little is known, except that she was a Dutch woman, the daughter of John Jasper, a merchant of Rotterdam. Her son has left us no description of her. There is no portrait, no anecdotes or sayings, nothing that would reveal her character; and very likely she was a plain, mediocre person; for if she had been otherwise, something more definite about her would have come down to us. Penn showed few if any Dutch traits. We might expect that his mother would have given him some of the thrifty, economical qualities of her nation. But he was just the reverse, a spender of money rather than a saver, and shy in details. His ideas of such subjects were grand, general, and sweeping like an Englishman's, in advance of his time. Pepys describes in his diary, in his amusing way, his first meeting Lady Penn in August, 1664, and her appearance.
Later on Pepys describes her as “mighty homely and looks old," yet he seemed to enjoy her comany above. She and her husband were, no doubt, plain people, and when they married were in moderate circumstances. The biographers describe Penn's birthplace near the Tower, as if his parents occupied the whole house; but it seems they only lodged there. Pepys, who for many years associated with them very intimately, gives us an account of their beginnings; but he obtained it from a certain Mrs. Turner, who was evidently an atrocious gossip.
But after making full allowances for Mrs. Turner, we can readily understand that there was a foundation of truth for what she said. Admiral Penn also, though of a respectable family, was a rough man. He was brought up as a sailor, and at the time he married and took lodgings near the Tower, he had only lately come out of the merchant service, a very rough and brutal school. Lord Clarendon, as we shall see, described him as a man who was always trying to put on the appearance of good breeding, and not always with success. His whole career shows that, starting with almost nothing, he had a consuming ambition to make a fortune and get into good society without being over-scrupulous as to the means he used. He was later successful in attaining his ambitions, attaining a great fortune and being knighted. He is described on his tomb as descended from the Penns of Penns-Lodge, in the County of Wilts, and also from the Penns of Penn, in the County of Bucks. The family had apparently lived in those places from time immemorial, and that is all we know about them with any certainty. One of the ancestors Is said to have been a monk in the Abbey of Glastonbury, in Somersetshire. When the monasteries were dissolved in the beginning of the reformation by Henry VIII, this monk was granted some of the Abbey lands, where he established Penns-Lodge, married, and had several children. Several traditions attempt to trace back still farther
the family history. Penn himself believed that
he was of Welsh origin; and according to Watson's
"Annals of Pennsylvania," * the Rev. Hugh David,
who went to Philadelphia in 1700, relates that he
and Penn were on the ship together, when Penn,
seeing a goat gnawing a broom, said:
“Hugh, dost thou observe that goat? See what hardy fellows the
Welsh are, how they can feed on a broom. However, Hugh, I am
a Welshman myself, and will relate by how strange a circumstance
our family lost their name. My grandfather (or great-grandfather)
was named John Tudor, and lived upon the top of a hill or mountain
in Wales; he was generally called John Penmunrith which in English
is ‘John on the top of a hill.' He removed from Wales into
Ireland, where be acquired considerable property. Upon his return
into his own country, he was addressed by his old friends and neighbors,
not in the former way, but by the name of Mr. Penn. He
afterwards removed to London, where he continued to reside under
the name of John Penn, which has since been the family name." Some of the details of this statement are not consistent with the rest of the family history; and in a letter written by Penn's son, John Penn, to the Rev. Dr. Smith, of Philadelphia, still another origin is suggested. It seems some woman in France named De Penn, or possibly De la Penne, had written to the Penns in England, claiming relationship with them. Some of her family, she said, had gone to England with William the Conqueror. This origin, seeming to be more flattering to the family pride, has been adopted by some writers; but there is no proof of its correctness. Of the two, the Welsh origin is the more likely to be the true one. But for our purpose we need go no farther back than Giles Penn, the grandfather of William Penn. The family appear to have lived in Bucks and Wilts as respectable people of some means, belonging to the country gentry. But we must not think of the country gentleman of that time as anything like what he has been during the last century in England. He was a very rough farmer, leading a life of rude plenty, not on a country-seat with trim lawns and gardens, but on rugged acres, with his cattle and chickens of first importance, and allowed to wander under his bedroom windows. Instead of the excellent education, foreign travel, and familiarity with London for a few months every year, which characterize the squire of modern times, he seldom saw London more than once in his lifetime, he had never traveled, and his education was usually of the poorest. He was an aristocrat only because he held the political power in his county, presiding as a magistrate, and commanding the trainbands. In other respects his manners as well as his life were rude and boorish. Whatever position the Penn family had they seem to have been unable to support towards the close of the sixteenth century, for the ancestral farm, Penns Lodge, passed out of their hands, and we find that Giles Penn took to a seafaring life. Commerce and shipping gave good opportunities in those days for making a fortune; and Giles Penn no doubt was anxious to restore his family position, and even to make it better than it had been. But the greatest opportunities for fortune-making came to the men who were courtiers, office-holders, or officers in the army or navy. The salaries of the courtiers who held office seem very large for the times; but the perquisites and opportunities under the system of corruption which prevailed were enormous. The population of England was then considerably less than five million, and the population of London not half a million; but the office of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, for example, was supposed to be worth forty thousand pounds a year; and from this high official down to the lowest clerk, tide-waiter, or gauger, the same methods of gross corruption gave opportunities which varied only in degree. Next in importance after the court officials for their opportunities for making money were the naval officers. Corruption and peculation were, if anything, more rife in the navy than at court; and war vessels were constantly employed to carry from port to port bullion and other valuable cargoes, which merchants dared not trust to ordinary vessels. In this service naval captains, being in a position to demand large rewards, often made several thousand pounds by a short voyage. The merchant marine was closely connected with the navy, for merchant ships were usually armed, carrying sometimes thirty or forty guns, and were often taken into the navy in large numbers to assist the public war-vessels. A training in the merchant service gave opportunities for entering the navy. Giles Penn secured the release of some captives held by the Salle rovers, as the pirates of Algiers were then called, and for this service he was to have been made vice-admiral of a fleet to be fitted out to punish the Algerians. He never received his commission, however; but instead of it was made consul to the Mediterranean ports. He failed to enjoy the lucrative opportunities of the navy, but he was determined that his son, the father of William Penn, should enjoy all that the navy had to bestow. He trained the boy most carefully on his own ship in the practice and theory of navigation, and the youth entered the navy of King Charles I. before he was twenty, and was at once given the rank of lieutenant When he was twenty-one years old, in 1642, he was made a captain. He almost immediately married, and within a little over a year his famous son William was born. So William Penn was the son of a very young man, almost a boy, but in command of the" Fellowship" of twenty-eight guns, with orders to join the fleet of Admiral Swanley in the Irish seas. Two years afterwards the father was made Rear-Admiral of Ireland; in 1646 he was given command of a squadron as Vice-Admiral of Ireland, and by the time he was thirty-one he was Vice-Admiral of England. This seems nowadays most ridiculously rapid advancement, and in lives of the admiral and also in lives of William Penn it is described in a way to give the impression that this youth must have been a naval prodigy. But in the condition of affairs at that time a man rose in the navy very rapidly, indeed almost instantly, under certain circumstances, so that such a thing as a boy admiral was not altogether impossible. Clowes, in his" History of the British Navy," has described what a man-of-war was in those days. It was a beautiful creation of art, carved from stem to stern with a richness of curves and tracery which is the wonder and despair of modern eyes. It was more beautiful, indeed, than serviceable, and it is no exaggeration to say that within it was very often, so far as the crew were concerned, a floating hell and pest-house. The sailors were wretched criminal creatures, collected largely by the press-gang, so ill paid and so seldom paid that they were continually in mutiny, and so ill fed that they were continually robbing and marauding for food. A mob of them once threatened to besiege the court at White Hall, and actually seized the Guild Hall at Plymouth. The sick were turned ashore starving, and the rapid mortality on many of the ships from disease and dirt was frightful. They were punished for bad conduct by ducking, keel-hauling, tongue-scraping, flogging, dragging through the water at the stern of a rowboat, tying up with weights about the neck, and a sailor that slept four times on watch was lashed to the bowsprit and left there to starve to death or drown. The officers who commanded them were more fortunate, and led a sumptuous, jovial life. Pepys, when with the fleet that brought back Charles II from Holland, describes how they spent the afternoon in playing nine-pins on the quarter deck with a grand dinner in the evening, followed by music and heavy drinking, which sent every one to bed quite mellow. The captains and officers had their mistresses on board, or, as some accounts put it, their harems, and there were also abandoned women allowed among the crew. Many of the officers in highest command, the captains and admirals, were landsmen without special training, and they bought and sold their commands and indulged in unlimited corruption and peculation. "The dock-yard officials robbed wholesale; the captains turned their ships into cargo-boats for their own profit, and conspired with the pursers to forge and sell seamen's tickets; carpenters, gunners, boatswains, and pursers cheated and swindled; imaginary men were home in nearly all ships, and their wages were shared among the officers; and government store-houses were converted into surreptitious residences for government servants and their families." (Clowes's" Royal Navy," vol. H. p. 19.) Military men entered the navy as freely as landsmen. At that time, and, indeed, in all the previous history of the world, there was no complete separation between the naval and military departments of a nation. In ancient times Pompey and Agrippa commanded forces both on sea and land. Lord Howard, who commanded the British fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada, was a landsman. Sir Walter Raleigh was both an admiral and a general. In Penn's time the best admirals, except himself were landsmen, and naval captains were often spoken of as colonels. Blake, who was the greatest of them, and who, indeed, is usually considered one of the two or three greatest admirals that Britain has produced, was a soldier, and never went to sea until he was fifty years old. Prince Rupert, who commanded the cavalry of Charles I, also commanded a fleet Dean and Montagu, of that time, were also military men. General Monk, who restored Charles II to the throne, also took his turn on the sea. It was he who, when he wanted his ship turned to the port side, aroused the amusement of his crew by giving the order, “Left wheel!” The reason why military men succeeded so well in command of fleets would seem to be that the navy had few, if any, regularly trained officers who could be raised to positions of large responsibility. Those who had a knowledge of seamanship were mostly mere tarpaulins, with neither education, manners, nor honesty. They had risen from the crew, and many of them had been captains of privateers, an occupation which did not improve their morals. There were some exceptions to this rule. Sir Christopher Mings, Sir John Narborough, and Sir Cloudsley Shovel had begun life as cabin-boys. But for the most part men of this sort were valuable only for certain purposes within a limited sphere. They were incapable of forming comprehensive plans or dealing with complicated situations, and they were compelled to yield the important commands to military men of wider attainments and more general education and experience. Penn rose to be an admiral at twenty-three for the reason apparently that he was a rare instance of a man with practical sea experience, who also had enough education and breadth of mind to take the responsibility of a large command. At heart he was a Royalist and preferred the king's cause; but his rapid promotions were received from Parliament and Cromwell. The army had gone over to the king and the navy had taken the side of Parliament. The crews, which had been starved and tortured under the king, thought they saw brighter prospects in the popular cause. They went over in large numbers, and Penn went with them. He was determined to rise in his profession, whatever flag he fought under, and he rightly judged that the popular and parliamentary cause would, for a time at least, be successful. He commanded the squadron that met with such ill success in its operations on the Irish coast; but the failure was through no fault of his. He distinguished himself and the Parliament voted him their thanks for his "courage and fidelity." Soon afterwards he was put under arrest, apparently because he was suspected of having, as, indeed, he had, a secret interest in the king's cause. He was released, however, soon promoted, and it was not long before he commanded the squadron which went in pursuit of the ships of that gallant landsman, Prince Rupert. But, although Penn followed him through the English Channel and even into the Mediterranean, the cavalryman eluded the trained sailor on his own element Penn's greatest service now followed in the naval war which Cromwell waged for two years with Holland. The Dutch, thinking they could wrest from the English the empire of the sea, refused to follow the ancient custom by which all ships had for ages saluted the British flag. This honor of the flag was originally a mere courtesy in recognition of the protection English ships had always given to the traders of all nations. But British men-of-war had now for a long time demanded it as a right and an insignia of their country's supremacy on the ocean. It was under this same principle of supremacy that they claimed the right of search which brought on the war of the United States with England in 1812. In the three terrible battles of the Dutch war, in which more than a hundred ships were engaged on each side, Penn greatly distinguished himself: In the second battle the Dutch Admiral Tromp grappled Penn's ship, and boarded him. Penn's sailors repulsed the attack, followed the enemy on to their own ship, and drove them below the hatches, where, with reckless courage, they exploded part of their powder, blowing their decks, with the English on them, into the air. The survivors of Penn's crew rushed back into the Dutch ship, and Tromp would have been taken if two other admirals-De Ruyter and De Witte had not come to his rescue. For his services in this battle Penn was given the rank of general-at-sea. The next year, 1654, he was sent by Cromwell in command of a fleet, accompanied by an army under General Venables, to capture as many as possible of the Spanish West Indian islands. And now a strange thing happened, which disclosed Admiral Penn's character and had a most important bearing on the career of his son. Both the admiral and General Venables secretly sent word to Charles II, then living in exile on the continent, that if he wished it, they would turn over the fleet and army to him. Charles thanked them, but declined their assistance, because he had no place to keep either a fleet or an army. But he would, he said, remember their offer; and neither he nor his brother and successor, James II, ever forgot it The fortune of Admiral Penn and of his son William was made by this act. Through the royal favor which flowed from it for the next fifty years William Penn delivered Quakers from prison, led the life of a successful courtier, and received the grant of the vast territory of Pennsylvania. Yet it was an act which cannot be regarded now in any other light than that of dishonorable treachery. Cromwell and the parliamentary party had made Admiral Penn all that he was, had given him his rapid promotion, his estates in Ireland, and raised him to the important command which made his offer of the fleet seem a thing of great value in the eyes of Charles II and his brother. It was common enough all through the civil war for men in the employ of Parliament to correspond secretly with the exiled king. Some of these were sincerely devoted to the king's cause; but most of them were merely putting out an anchor to windward in case the king should return. Penn went farther than any of them, and overstepped all bounds. He, no doubt, saw that the parliamentary cause was gradually waning, and he was determined that his anchor to windward should be the largest and most powerful of all At that time, however, professional honor was unknown in the British navy, and, brought up in the midst of all kinds of official corruption and the moral looseness of the civil war, it is not likely that Admiral Penn's conscience was seriously troubled. Anxious he must have been for the outcome of such a daring and dangerous move; but the end showed that he had calculated with the most perfect shrewdness and cunning. His son William, with amusing vagueness, has attempted to explain his father's double service to both Cromwell and the king: " 'Tis true, he was actually engaged both under the Parliament and king, but not as an actor in our late domestic troubles; his compass always steering him to eye a national concern and not intestine wars, and therefore not so aptly theirs [the Parliament's] in a way of opposition as the nation's.''-Granville Penn's Memorials of Sir William. Penn, vol. ii. p. 569. It has been supposed that Cromwell knew at once of this offer of the fleet and army to Charles; but, cool and sagacious as he always was, he said nothing, made no move, and doubtless laughed with grim Puritan humor when he heard that the offer had been rejected. This is highly probable; for he spent, it is said, sixty thousand pounds annually in maintaining spies at the court of Charles, and if he did not know of the offer at once, it seems quite certain that he soon heard of it He knew, no doubt, that the offer must necessarily be refused, and that Penn was merely placing his great anchor to windward for future contingencies. So he allowed the expedition to go on as it had been planned, well knowing that Penn's professional pride would compel him to do his best. The expedition failed utterly against San Domingo, but not from any fault of Penn, for the army, which was hopelessly inefficient, alone took part in the attack. In the attack on Jamaica both army and fleet acted together; the island fell into their hands without a struggle, and is still a British colony. As soon as Admiral Penn returned to England he was committed to the Tower on the charge of coming home without leave. But that was evidently not the real reason. Cromwell shrewdly judged that he had obtained from him all the service that was possible or safe. He was ordered to confess his fault, surrender his commission as general-at-sea, and make his submission to the Lord Protector. When he had done all this, he was set free both from prison and from the navy. He was rendered as harmless as possible short of putting him to death or imprisoning him for life, which would not have been politic. He retired to Ireland to the estates that had been given him for his services by Cromwell, and there waited and in a mild way plotted for the restoration of the king. On the eve of the restoration he was summoned from his retirement to represent in Parliament the town of Weymouth, and he hurried to Holland to be the bearer of the glad tidings to Charles. He was immediately knighted, made commissioner of admiralty, and governor of Kinsale. His Irish estates were given back to their royalist owner from whom Cromwell had taken them, and in place of them other estates in Ireland were given to Penn. He had achieved a large part of his ambition, which was to make a fortune, become a courtier, associate with noblemen, and perhaps become one. Henceforth his life was passed in the court circles, for that alone could satisfy him. He was at heart an intensely ardent Royalist and aristocrat, and although he had aided the Cromwellian and parliamentary cause, he had in the end used it most cleverly to advance his own royalist interests. The king and his brother James, Duke of York, bound Penn closely to themselves. The duke became Lord High Admiral, and took Penn into his personal service. In the campaign against the Dutch, in 1665, Penn, with the title great captain commander, was on the duke's ship as his confidential adviser, for the duke was a landsman; and in this relation, in which he practically commanded the fleet, Penn took part in the famous and decisive battle against the Dutch admiral, Opdam. This was the last of Penn's sea service. He was only about forty-five years old; but his health was already broken by severe attacks of the gout, and he died in 1670, before he was fifty. He was rather young to have the gout so badly; but he was, it seems, a heavy drinker, and probably also a heavy eater after the manner of those times. "In the evening at Sir W. Pen's with my wife at supper; he in a mad ridiculous, drunken humour; and it seems there have been some late distances between his lady and him as my [wife] tells me." (U Pepys Diary," vol. v. p. 434.) It should be remembered, however, that Pepys was also enriching himself while in the service of the Admiralty by every opportunity; and no doubt Penn interfered with many of his schemes. Pepys's hatred of him, and yet continual association with him, is amusing at times, especially when Pepys is disgusted at the bad dinners he gets at Penn's house and complains that when he gives Penn a dinner the stupid sailor is unable to appreciate it. Pepys's morals were bad, and he was intriguing with the wives of many of his acquaintances. In weighing what he says, we must remember that by his own statement he attempted familiarities with Admiral Penn's wife, and also had designs on his daughter. Lord Clarendon, who knew Penn well, has also left us a description of him: "Penn, who had much the worse understanding, had a great mind to appear better bred and to speak like a gentleman; he had got many good words which he used at adventure; he was a formal man and spoke very leisurely, but much, and left the matter more intricate and perplexed than he found it," (Vol. ii, p, 354-) But I cannot give the whole life of the admiral. I have dwelt on many of the details of it principally to show what a strong hold he secured on the affections of Charles and the Duke of York, for this was the foundation of his son's career. After his service against Opdam the duke wanted him to take another command at sea; and when Penn declined, insisted on his acceptance. But military men were now in control of the navy, and they were very jealous of regular sailors like Penn. They had him impeached for helping himself too liberally to the silk, spices, and jewels on board some rich prizes that had been taken from the Dutch. He does not appear to have been guilty; but the impeachment proceedings effectually blocked his appointment until it was too late for him to go to sea, and then the prosecution was dropped. The king, anxious to reward him, was about to raise him to the peerage under the title of Viscount Weymouth; but his son William had by this time become a Quaker and was protesting loudly against all titles as vanities of the flesh. It seemed ridiculous to give a title that would descend to such a strange fanatic, and the king's good intentions were checked. So the admiral, through his nuisance of a son, failed to attain what was, no doubt, one of the chief objects of his ambition. But he had picked up in one way or another a considerable fortune, which he left to boy he considered deluded; and, most important of all, he left him the extreme good-will and affection of Charles II and the Duke of York, who became James II. He had lent to the crown various sums of money, and these at the time of his death, with the arrears of his pay, amounted to over twelve thousand pounds. Eleven years afterwards the debt, with interest, had grown to sixteen thousand pounds, and was liquidated by the grant to the son of the province of Pennsylvania. This web site's purpose is to show how to become |
